Oliver Sacks Quotes

A whole world is taken to the grave with the dead person; each one of us is unique and unrepeatable.

There is a great suspicion of saying that anyone, especially a child, is 'the product of destiny,' or 'formed by fate,' or 'predestined for a certain life.' I am suspicious, too, of efforts to cage children or adults in preconceived ideas of who they are or should be.

Everyone has their own different life experiences which make them who they are. No two people's life experiences are the same. And mine are just unique to me.

A human being is a single being. Unique and unrepeatable.

You are so busy being YOU that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.

You are the only you God made... God made you and broke the mold.

Somebody who is unique - and this will get me into trouble - by definition cannot be replaced.

A life that is, like any other, unlike any other.

At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.

Lincoln was not a type. He stands alone - no ancestors, no fellows, no successors.

Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings.

Over and above the various prejudices I acknowledge, the affinities I feel, the attractions I succumb to, the events which occur to me and to me alone- over and above a sum of movements I am conscious of making, of emotions I alone experience- I strive, in relation to other men, to discover the nature, if not the necessity, of my difference from them. Is it not precisely to the degree I become conscious of this difference that I shall recognize what I alone have been put on this earth to do, what unique message I alone may bear, so that I alone can answer for its fate?

To be oneself, simply oneself, is so amazing and utterly unique an experience that it's hard to convince oneself so singular a thing happens to everybody.

Even if one is neither vain nor self-obsessed, it is so extraordinary to be oneself - exactly oneself and no one else - and so unique, that it seems natural that one should also be unique for someone else.

I think everybody wants to be their own person and be an individual.

In all the huge and amazing and infinitely varied world--there is only one you.

I am just like everybody else...because there is nobody like me in the whole world.

There has never been, and never again will be a human being like you. There is nothing ordinary about you. If you feel ordinary, it is because you have chosen to hide the extraordinary parts of yourself from the world.

No one compares to you. Just remember that. There's no one out there - there's only one of you, and that's it. And whatever you believe about you that's great, no one else has it. And I can't look like you, there's no way I can slip into your body and be you, and you can't slip into my body and be me. This is all we're gonna get.

When I compare myself, my being-myself, with anything else whatever, all things alike, all in the same degree, rebuff me with blank unlikeness.

Everyone is unique and each experience is different.

There were thousands of women in New York alone who could replace me in his life, but there was only one Gideon Cross.

Earth has scarcely an acre that does not remind us of actions that have long preceded our own, and its clustering tombstones loom up like reefs of the eternal shore, to show us where so many human barks have struck and gone down.

I always thought I was different.

You are not accidental. The world needs you. Without you, something will be missing in existence and nobody can replace it.